Completed the special edition of the Bristol Story. May still be some last change requests but hopefully not. Big chunk of day spent looking after Joe, very enjoyable but it means work has overflowed into the weekend.

Although I've got the first twelve pages of the book roughed out, i still feel like I'm in the planning stage. I'm still making decisions about materials, page design, and work process. If I include an unnecessary step in the process now, time lost on each page will be magnified 200 times. That kind of thinking leads to paralysis.

At least one decision has been made - I'm using Bristol board. There are several reasons for this.

First, the animator's lightbox/drawing board I was using for Brunel has gone back to its rightful owner, which has prompted a move away from layout paper.

Second, I saw some absolutely beautiful original artwork at the weekend, the work of Steven Roberts and Hunt Emerson. It made me very keen to get back to producing a tangible physical page of art instead of scattered scraps of thin paper with odd panels on them and gaps for computer generated details.

Third, Bristol board is delightfully smooth, even the bottom of the range stuff, and heavy enough to take solid blacks. I think this story will benefit from more black, some of the Brunel pages looked a bit light.

Finally, it's a history of Bristol, what else could I use but Bristol board?

I've added a new batch of drawings to my deviantART page.http://simongurr.deviantart.com/gallery/digitalart/drawings/people/They were drawn very quickly, using an A6 Wacom tablet and the pressure sensitive brush tool in Flash. I really like the freedom of drawing directly with a brush, and using a computer to do it seems to make me less inhibited about making mistakes than with real ink and paper. I'd love to get some of this life into my normal comic style, but it's difficult to do a narrative scene with multiple figures performing actions against backgrounds and looking consistent without pencilling first.

I've finally made it onto Livejournal. I decided to join as a way of keeping up with the Bristol Comics Forum, but I might use it as a kind of work in progress journal too, not sure yet. It will be less formal than my official website, anyway.